Categories: OLD Media Moves

Is Bloomberg Media’s future uncertain?

Matthew Ingram of Fortune magazine writes about the future of Bloomberg Media in the wake of the departure of one of its top executives, Josh Tyrangiel, who had also been editor in chief of Bloomberg Businessweek.

Ingram writes, “Tyrangiel, meanwhile, is widely seen as a genius who managed to rescue BusinessWeek from almost certain oblivion. And a year ago, he was given responsibility for all consumer-facing media content at the company, including TV — but that was just a few months before Micklethwait arrived and started to assert control, with Bloomberg’s approval. And now Tyrangiel is now gone as well, and the future of the magazine is very much up in the air. And so is the future of Justin Smith, who appears to have lost a turf war with Micklethwait, and is now seen by many as a man headed for the exit.

“All of which raises the obvious question: What should Bloomberg’s media strategy be? Does it even need a public-facing website at all? And if it does have one, why isn’t it behind a hard paywall, like the Financial Times or the Economist? Is reading news on the Bloomberg site really going to convince anyone to shell out the $21,000 per year for one of the company’s dedicated terminals? That seems unlikely at best. But why pour resources into money-losing efforts like TV and the web if there’s no tangible payoff?

“Reuters went through a similar kind of soul-searching in 2013, after it was deep in the throes of a multimillion-dollar project to redesign and relaunch its website. New CEO Andrew Rashbass killed the project, and half a dozen editors and executives who were hired to build and run it quickly left.

“If your main business consists of selling valuable financial information to paying users of your service or terminal, then what is the purpose of having a public website or a free magazine, or TV shows? Marketing? Public relations? Lead generation? Vanity?”